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Day one: Virginia Beach, a taste of Busch Gardens

As mentioned in yesterday’s post, we were to get going at 3 a.m. It was about 4:30 before my father arrived at my apartment, but no matter; the trip was smooth and uneventful, and we made it to Virginia quickly enough.

As we did two years ago, we opted to go the Delmarva peninsula route and cross the Chesapeake Bay Bridge Tunnel, which brought us right over to Virginia Beach, where we spent a chunk of the afternoon.

It was a beautiful day, with a good breeze to keep it feeling cool. It’s fun to spend a bit of time at Virginia Beach.

We then headed to the hotel and pretty much immediately headed over to Busch Gardens for a few hours; this weekend is the last weekend of their Food & Wine Festival so we wanted to make sure we had time to check it out. We opted to hold off until tomorrow to partake in what they had to offer, but we were impressed with what we saw thus far.

Some roller coaster riding followed; we also caught the This is Oktoberfest show. I’ve written about it here; when we visited two years ago it had been cancelled without much hope for revival. Yet it made its return in 2013, and continued this year. It’s a Busch Gardens classic, and this cast seems to have more fun with it than I remember the previous casts (although it had been over a decade, there are a bunch of videos on YouTube with casts playing it straight). There’s two versions of the show, and I suspect we’ll see the other one before the week is out; we tend to watch this show quite a bit.

One big change, which I read about before heading on the trip, was the park’s England section, which is right at the beginning, was redone a bit to add a snack shop and to promote heavily their new show, “London Rocks.” We didn’t see the show today (that’ll probably happen tomorrow), but we did see the changes. For the most part, it just felt more colorful, although the front of the Globe Theatre was a bit much. Other additions didn’t seem horribly out of place, although it was certainly different for a park that changes somewhat glacially at times.

After that, it was a long day, so time to crash, but we’re planning on heading back to Busch Gardens for a full day tomorrow, which should be fun!